John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look

by The Long Lavender Look(lit)

  "April? Tuesday? Unless I was sick, and that would be on the office records, I was right there at my desk in room fifteen-twenty on the fifteenth floor of the First Prudential Building. I work for Hutzler, Baskowich, and Troon. Mutual Funds. I'm an analyst. I've been with the firm eleven years now. Ask anybody."

  So where was McGee on any April Tuesday you want to name? The best I could do would be a plausible guess. Maybe I should keep a diary. Or have a time card and punch clock. Or is it a punch card and a time clock. Something that goes ding.

  So you roam the fringes of the structured society, and it is just fine until they hold you up to the light. Then, somehow, in their eyes and yours, too, you begin to look like a cat burglar.

  Five

  AT FIVE-THIRTY jailer Priskitt came around and said I could take my chances on the American plan dinner, or sign a chit for a take-out meal from a restaurant down the street, said chit to be deducted from my captive funds when they were returned to me. He recommended the special deal. It turned out to be a piece of fried meat, boiled potatoes, overdone turnip greens, battery acid that smelled somewhat like coffee, and a soggy little wedge of apple pie. Four and a quarter, plus seventy-five cents for the trusty who had been sent to get it.

  Lennie Sibelius did not appear at six-thirty, nor at seven, nor at seven-thirty, nor at eight. I began to wonder if he had tucked his Apache into a swamp.

  At almost eight-thirty Priskitt came and got me and took me to a small locker room at the far end of the lower corridor. It smelled like stale laundry. Lennie was sitting on a battered metal table, custom shoes swinging. Lemon yellow shirt and pale blue slacks.

  "Your tailor isn't doing much for you, pal," he said.

  "So let's leave and you find me a new one."

  "We'll leave. Don't worry about it. But not right now."

  I sat on a bench in front of the lockers. "When did you get in?" He said he'd been around for more than two hours, having some interesting conversations.

  "Anything you want to repeat for the tape recorder?"

  "My guess would be that this room is clean, Trav. I think he goes by the book. Lawyer and client relationship is confidential stuff. He might stick a shill into a cell with a suspect and bug the conversation to pick up a lead, but I think the rules mean something to him."

  "He is something else entire, Lennie."

  "He makes better sense when you know the whole pattern. Local boy. Hell of a high-school quarterback. Offers from all over the country. Picked one from Michigan. Did well, but not quick unough for the pros. Married a bright girl up there. Both of them became teachers. She taught speech. She worked on his accent, weeded it out. Both of them worked in the public school system in Rochobter, New York. Hyzer's mother became ill, very ill, and Norman and his wife and baby daughter came down here. Hyzer's mother died. He was still here trying to get the house cleared out and put it up for sale when a couple of Miami kids in a stolen car knocked over one of those mini-markets on the edge of town in broad daylight, pistol-whipped the clerk, but suddenly had a cop cruiser riding up on them with the flasher going. They came through town at high speed and lost it on a turn and rode the sidewalk and smashed into a concrete power pole. It killed one of them and crippled the other. But they mashed Hyzer's bride and baby against the front of the post office thirty feet before they got to the pole. Killed them instantly. Hyzer buried them beside his mother and disappeared. Almost a year later he showed up here and announced for sheriff. No party affiliation. Independent. He won big. Sentimental favorite. Two years later he barely squeaked in, because he had done no glad-handing at all. Next time he won big because of his record. Lives for the job. Runs a taut ship. Keeps this county squeaky clean. No outside interests at all. If he is crazy, it is a productive compulsion. The rumor is that he has quietly built up files on every politician in the county, and they would rather not see anybody run against Hyzer. He takes correspondence courses. Law, criminology, ballistics, sociology, crime prevention, rehabilitation, penology."

  "And I'm just another of those people who smash wives and babies against the post office wall?"

  "Maybe. But buried deeply enough so you won't see any outward effect from it."

  "Like Meyer did?"

  "That part doesn't fit. It puzzles me. I am going to make it fit, and somebody is going to be sorrier than they can possibly imagine. But there's more we have to know before that is going to make any sense."

  "How much did Hyzer tell you?"

  "All the questions and all the answers up to the point where you stopped playing his game."

  So I told him about the envelope with the directions I had scribbled on the back. I told him how I could remember clearly what I had done with it. Everything in our wallets had still been sodden by the time we reached Al Storey's gas station in the early morning. "I took everything out. Every time you have to go through your wallet you find junk you don't need. I made a pile of that junk on top of that tin table out in the morning sunlight. I know the envelope and instructions were there because I unfolded it to see what it was. And by then, if what Hyzer says is true, this Frank Baither was already dead. After the station opened up, I picked up Meyer's discards and mine and dropped them into a can by the side of the building, on top of some old newspapers, oil cans, and wiper blades."

  "Means that somebody took it out and carried it twenty miles north and sneaked past the deputy guarding the Baither place, and planted it inside where it would be found. Meaning that Hyzer has to believe it happened just that way."

  "It must have slipped out of my pocket while I was killing Frank Baither."

  "Steady,as she goes, pal. Now here is something that bothers Hyzer also, I think. You were bound for Lauderdale. You left Lake Passkokee. Did you plan any stops on the way?"

  "No."

  "Then why come down 112 to the Trail? That's doing it the hard way."

  "We did it the hard way. I picked a little unmarked road that was supposed to take us right on over to the direct route. But with the roads torn up, everything looked different. After about three miles I knew I had the wrong road. So I kept going, hoping the damned thing would come out on the road we wanted. But it wandered all over hell and gone and finally came out onto 112 about fifteen miles north of the Cypress City cutoff. By then it was obviously shorter and quicker to come down 112 and take the Trail over to Route 27, then cut over to the Parkway on 820."

  "And Hyzer keeps thinking about how you and Meyer match the description."

  "What description, dammit?"

  "Remember four years ago the way some people hit the money truck with all the racetrack cash aboard?"

  "Just outside Miami? Vaguely I've forgotten the gimmick."

  "It was beautiful," Lerinie said. "Absolutely beautiful. The three clowns who had truck duty stuck to the same routine every time they made the racetrack run. They would get there empty and park in back of a drive-in, and all three would go in, eat, kill some time until the big parking areas emptied and the people in the money room had time to weigh, band, sack, and tally the cash. Then they would go get it, and make a fifty-minute run back to the barn. It was after a very big handle that they were hit. They woke up on a little shell road way back in some undeveloped acreage. The locks had been drilled and the truck and radio disabled. They were too groggy to walk for help right away. They were separated and questioned. And examined. Same story. Each had become very very sleepy about fifteen minutes after they had loaded the money and left the track. Heavy dose of some form of barbiturate. Traces still left in the bloodstream. The driver had pulled over and stopped, thinking he would just take a nice little nap like the guard sitting there beside him, snoring. The police turned up a few people who had seen a big brute of a wrecker put a hook on the armored truck, lift the front end, and trundle it off. They traced it back to the drive-in, a very small place with normally two people working during the daytime, a man in the kitchen and a girl working the counter. At night they'd have a second girl car-hopping. This wa
s the pickup after the big Sunday afternoon race card, with the take including the Friday night and Saturday night meets. The men said the girl on the counter was new. A blonde. They had kidded around with her. By that time they had already had another report which dovetailed. A girl and three men had hit that drive-in a half hour before the money-truck people walked in. They had taped up the waitress and the chef and stashed them in a supply closet. The man had been too frightened and hysterical to pick up anything useful. The girl gave a full report of what she had noticed and remembered. One man was your size, Trav. One description fits Meyer. The third was average height, but very broad and thick in the shoulders and neck. She thought there might be a fourth man on watch outside the rear entrance, but she wasn't certain. She said the girl was young."

  "You know a lot about it, Lennie."

  "I had a client they were trying to set up for that truck job. And now, all of a sudden, better than three years later, I've got two more."

  "This Frank Baither was in on it, then?"

  "Sheriff Hyzer didn't exactly break down and tell me all his problems, pal. We established a relationship of mutual respect. There have been generations of Baithers in this county, some very solid and some very unpredictable, but all of them tough and quick, and a few of them tough, quick, and smart. Like Frank. Lived alone in the old family place along that route. He'd be gone for weeks or months. Tax bills and utility bills and so on went to the Cypress Bank and Trust. He kept money in a special account and the bills were paid out of it. No visible means of support. When he'd move back in, he'd usually have a houseguest. Some pretty dolly in tight pants, visiting for a while. Hyzer is concerned about Cypress County, not about what Frank Baither might be doing elsewhere. Then a funny thing happened. Smart Frank Baither, on a Saturday night, got stumbling drunk and held up a gas station right here in town. Went lurching off, spilling the cash out of the till. Got grabbed and put in a cell. Didn't make bail. Pleaded guilty, and got hit by the circuit court judge with five for armed robbery. Got transported off to Raiford. Did three and a half at Raiford before they let him out twelve days ago."

  "So?"

  "Item. The blood test on the stumbling drunk, taken under protest, showed that he could have had two small beers, maybe three. Item. Discreet investigation showed he had enough in his special account so that he could have made bail during the three months he had to wait here for trial, but he didn't. Item. For a man so involved with the outdoors, the swamps and the glades, Frank made a happy adjustment to this place and also to Raiford. Item. When Hyzer went out and checked Frank Baither's place after arrest, he found that Frank had done all those little chores a man living alone will do when he expects to be away for a long long time. Put up the shutters and drained the pipes, disconnected the pumps and greased them. Drained the aerator."

  "Okay. He wanted to be tucked away."

  "Hyzer reasoned that if somebody was out to kill Frank Baither, Baither would have ambushed them rather than hide in jail. Hyzer checked out the big scores made anywhere in the country just before Baither set himself up for a felony conviction. He kept coming back to the money truck in Miami. Baither was medium height with a bull neck and very broad thick shoulders. As a kid he had worked for his uncle who operated a little yard, making cement block, and he had carried enough tons of mix and tons of finished block to give him that muscular overdevelopment. Hyzer reasoned that Frank Baither had somehow tricked his partners, eased out with the track money, hid it well, then set himself up for free room and board for a long time, counting on the odds that the partners on the outside would not last long enough to be waiting when he got out. The hard-case operators have very few productive years, Trav. Then they are tucked away, underground or behind the walls. Frank had about two weeks between the money-truck job and landIng in the Cypress County jail, assuming he was involved. Hyzer wanted more to go on. He arranged to get word from Raiford on Frank's activities in prison. By the end of the first year he learned that Frank had cultivated a few Latin Americans there. He was diligently studying Spanish. And it looked as If he would become reasonably fluent. The parts fitted together. Get out, pick up the money, and go. And live like a Greek shipowner for the rest of his life, with enough Spanish to learn who to bribe, and enough money to guarantee immunity."

  "He told you a lot, Lennie."

  "Some of it he told me, some of it he hinted at, and some of it is what I came up with to fill in the blanks. That sheriff went over every inch of the Baither place, and came up empty every time. Now here is another part. Somebody gave Frank a good rap on the head and taped him to a chair, and wound his head with tape, leaving a hole over one ear, and a hole over the mouth. Then they worked on him. They spoiled him. He had to know he was done, and so with nothing left to save except a little more agony, he talked. Then they shoved a rusty ice pick into his heart."

  "Assumption?"

  "A finality about it. End of interview. From the look of the rest of him, they would have kept going until he died of the special attentions."

  "So Hyzer," I said wearily, "buys the idiot idea that we teamed with Frank Baither and took the money truck and we kept track of him, knew when he got out of Baiford, and set up this complicated cover story, got to him, tortured him and killed him, left an incriminating envelope behind, lost my old car in the canal, and then.... For God's sake, Lennie! Can't you straighten him out? Where's the money?"

  "Right where Frank Baither hid it. But now you and Meyer know where it is, and you can take your time picking it up."

  He made me go over the incident we should have reported and didn't. Lots of questions. Estimates of elapsed time.

  He paced in the constricted space, glowering. "The only way to defend a case is to build an alternate possibility up to the stature of reasonable doubt, McGee. There was a girl in the mud beside the canal. Let's say she was the young girl who played waitress. Let's say Frank Baither was prowling after her in the night. Hutch is the big one who fits your description. Orville fits Meyer's description. They came after Frank Baither last night. The girl got away. Baither got in his old truck and went cruising looking for Orville and Hutch. You went in the canal at ten o'clock. The shots were fired a little after eleven. He thought he hit Hutch in the head. He offered to make a deal with Orville. He drove back to his place, off guard because he thought he knew where Hutch and Orville were. He got back and they jumped him. Maybe they had a car hidden away nearby, and maybe the two of them and the girl are five hundred miles gone by now, laughing and singing, with the trunk packed with money. But that damned envelope, Trav. That is physical evidence. You are absolutely positive about what you did with it?"

  "Beyond any doubt."

  "Then the deputy he posted at the Baither place has to be lying when he told Hyzer nobody entered the place. Can you remember the deputy's name?"

  "Arnstead, I think. But why would somebody..."

  "'Why' comes way down the list, client. It comes after 'how', 'when', 'where', and 'what'. 'How' is the big word."

  He opened the door and whistled. Priskitt took me back after Lennie Sibelius wished me a nice night's sleep, saying he didn't count on getting much himself.

  As Priskitt caged me, I asked him about Meyer. "Feeling much better. Fascinating man. It's guests like you two who make this almost a civilized occupation, McGee. Nighty night."

  They had the cell lights on a rheostat. At ten o'clock they faded from white glare to yellow glow. You can't help wondering what it would feel like to be in such a box for the next dozen years, and wonder if you could handle it, and walk out of it still reasonably sane.

  I remembered reading a sentence long ago, I know not where or when, or who wrote it. It said, "The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality."

  Back to the envelope. It had to be an unplanned act on someone's part. An improvisation. Away to muddy the water. Somebody made the decision after Sheriff Hyzer and Deputy Cable had driven off with us. A customer or an employee. Or the boss. Al Stor
ey, or the big young dull-looking one named Terry. Or the older one who had arrived late in the blue Rambler. Henry... The one with all the white teeth. Or somebody who came on duty later. Al, Terry, and Henry had all heard Hyzer say that Frank Baither had been killed. His attitude made it evident he thought Hyzer and I were involved.

  I dug away at my chigger bites. Get me out, Lennie. Get us out of here.

  Six

  Up UNTIL eleven o'clock it was a very dull morning. Then Priskitt arrived, humming happily, carrying a hanger with freshly cleaned and pressed slacks and shirt thereon. He had my toilet kit in the other hand.

  He unlocked the cell door and said, "Priskitt at your service, sir. You will wish to shower? You are free to go right ahead, by yourself."

  "Those clothes were..."